Hunger makes you restless. You dream about food--not just any food, but perfect food, the best food, magical meals, famous and awe...-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother's milk singing to your bloodstream.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It seems only yesterday that we sawThe movie with the cows in it...And turned to one at your side, who burpedAs morning saw a new garnet-and-pea-green order proposeItself out of the endless bathos, like science-fiction lumps.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I worry about people who get born nowadays, because they get born into such tiny families--sometimes into no family at all. When y...ou're the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope Diamond. And that encourages you to talk too much.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

He will watch you while you work, and always has a good word to say or a quip to snap at you to keep you cheered up, but when it c...omes to taking off his coat and lending a hand,... he is an Oriental incense-holder on the guest-room mantle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Kitchens were different then, too--not only what came out of them, but their smells and sounds. A hot pie cooling smells different... from a frozen pie thawing. Oilcloth and linoleum and apples in an open bowl and ruffled rubber aprons make a different aromatic mix from Formica and ceramic tile and mangoes in an acrylic fruit ripener and plastic-coated aprons printed with "Who invited all these tacky people?" And the kitchen sounds. I am not sure that today's kitchen is noisier. But the noises are different. Today you get the song of the food processor and the blender, the intermittent hum of the reefer and the freezer, the buzz-slosh-and-grunt of the dishwasher, the violently audible digestive processes of the waste disposal in the sink. Then it was the whir and clatter of the hand-powered eggbeater, the thunk-thunk-thunk of somebody mashing potatoes, or, in green-pea season, the crisp pop of pea pod and the rattle-rattle-rattle of peas into the pan.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Many of us carry memories of an influential teacher who may scarcely know we existed, yet who said something at just the right tim...e in our lives to snap a whole world into focus.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of the snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jump...ers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda,--these are in the system, and our habits like theirs. You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughter-house is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity, expensive races,--race living at the expense of race.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The basis of political economy is non-interference. The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply. ...Do not legislate. Meddle, and you snap the sinews with your sumptuary laws.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Initially, between the trees, he caught sight of whirling, jumping bodies. Heya-hey-heya. Someone climbing. Rocks pitched after a ...board; and on the river, tilting patches of reflection. Heya-fulla-heya-heya. Boys were sliding down the bank on their buttocks, roughing the scaly sand. They sailed a can lid on the water where at first it turned, floating, then sank, burning like a mirror. Hiyah-smilah. Hee-mee? Coltch. Skirts rose slowly, slowly subsided. A parasol flew open with a snap. Or-rawk. Gah. Houf. Half buried in the shingle, a deep red brick was then awash. Yo-yo giggy. Teetoo Sheek? Num! Lissa-lissa. A willow leaned out, trailing its leaves in the water.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »